Skip to content
John Hodge

Research

My PhD work was on reconfigurable metasurfaces and generative deep learning for electromagnetic design. It is the root of the physics-and-ML thread that runs through my applied-science work today.

453+ citations · h-index 11 · i10-index 13 (Google Scholar, as of June 2026) · Google Scholar

PhD dissertation

Reconfigurable Intelligent Metasurfaces for Wireless Communication and Sensing Applications

Ph.D. dissertation, Virginia Tech · 2022

Metasurfaces are electrically thin arrays of sub-wavelength scattering elements (meta-atoms) that control electromagnetic waves through engineered surface boundary conditions. This dissertation develops reconfigurable metasurfaces, with active components embedded in each meta-atom, for programmable radiation patterns, integrated communications systems where the RF aperture and transceiver live in the surface itself, metasurface-enabled direct signal modulation, and deep-learning-based metasurface design.

  • Metasurfaces
  • Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces
  • Electromagnetics
  • Antennas
  • Wireless Communications
  • Deep Learning
  • Sensing

View on VTechWorks → Defense slides →

Selected publications

Full list and PDFs on Google Scholar.

Awards

Patent

Wideband reflectarray using electrically re-focusable phased array feed. Northrop Grumman Systems Corp, 2021. US 10,897,075 B2

Talks & public work

Public presentations and case studies on multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) and model-based systems engineering for phased-array antennas.